“A moderate and distant risk”

“Most Americans believe global warming is real but a moderate and distant risk. While they strongly support policies like investing in renewable energy, higher fuel economy standards and international treaties, they strongly oppose carbon taxes on energy sources that put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”

Titled Americans Believe Global Warming Is Real, Want Action, But Not As A Priority, this report on a University of Oregon study is an interesting look on American attitudes:

Using affective-image analysis, Leiserowitz also asked Americans what thoughts or images came to mind when thinking about global warming. Sixty-one percent of their associations fell into just four categories: melting ice in the Arctic; warmer temperatures; impacts on non-human nature; and polar ozone holes.

“These responses help us understand the connotative meaning of global warming — and why Americans react the way they do,” Leiserowitz said. “These associations are to geographically or psychologically distant impacts, generic warming trends, or a completely different environmental problem. Thus it’s not too surprising that global warming remains a relatively low priority.

“One of the most important things that we found is what we didn’t find,” he added. “We found no references, no associations, of the impacts of climate change on either human health or extreme weather events. Yet these are, arguably, among the most important potential impacts, because, ultimately, the consequences are going hurt people.”

America needs a kick in the ass. For example, this should feel like a punch in the gut: A series of connected lakes has been discovered deep beneath glaciers in Antarctica and are speeding streams of polar ice into the sea, scientists announced. Water under glaciers has been shown to significantly speed up glacier slide off and melting, raising the sea level. To add to the point: Scientists warn it may be too late to save the ice caps – The Guardian says the calculations for totaling green house gasses have been wrong, and the increases will almost guarantee the melting of the caps, resulting in sea level rise of 4-6 metres (13-20 feet). Some of this will happen when we are already dead; the consequences will continue long after us.

To bring it home, for San Diego this would mean much of the coastal areas under water – PB, IB, and the complete loss of Coronado. It also seems to suggest Imperial County and Baja California would see massive changes – The Sea of Cortez would reach almost to El Centro and Calexico. It would seem to only take a storm or two to threaten floods of the entire Imperial Valley. Imagine the Salton sea becoming part of the Sea of Cortez, and the Pacific.

As dire as the sea level rise is for certain areas, everyone will be affected by weather and biological changes. Rainfall patterns are a matter of life and death in many parts of the world, and weather systems may change dramatically with changing temperatures. This of course will have a huge change on our food supply with a very real threat to our industrial agriculture that feeds much of the world. This look at hardyness zone changes from 1990 to 2006 is very telling.

The increase of C02 will mean more is dissolved in the ocean to form carbonic acid. This results in ocean acidification, placing many ecosystems at risk. Overall, the changes are expected to extinct 15 and 37 percent of known species by 2050. On the flip side, these changes will also bring new opportunities to invasive species and diseases that are quick to adapt.

It is hard to imagine the response to this. As Fareed Zakaria has noted, even if we adopted the most far-reaching plans to combat climate change, we would still watch greenhouse gases rise for decades. He argues that in addition to reducing our output, we have to start figuring out how to cope with the damage we have already done:

“Many environmental advocates fear that talking about coping with global warming will hamper efforts to slow it down. In fact, we have no alternative but to do both. Mitigation and adaptation complement each other. In both cases, the crucial need is to stop talking and start acting.”

More to come from my high horse later…